Peter's Blog

I didn't mention the Django templating system in my citique yesterday. It seems ok, as templating systems go, my favourite python templating system being cheetah.

The main advantage of cheetah that I have seen is that you can embed more python code in cheetah templates, or at least use more complex expressions to retrieve values. The django template system seems to restrict you to retrieving values of object properties: you cannot call functions as it complains about '(' characters. I think this is designed to force you to separate logic from presentation which is a Good Thing.

The Django system supports inheritance so a specific web page can inherit from a template describing the overall layout which is cool. I have yet to figure out how or whether it is possible to the equivalent of #include or import to put common sub-blocks in some pages (conceptually similar to a subroutine call). The 'load' tag might be the way.

The django system looks good enough to me to use in preference to cheetah: that's the coolest thing, I have the choice and I could even use both if I wanted.